An exclusive for the Partially Examined Life community, Chapter 6 of my new book Free Your Mind: New Philosophy
Chapter 6 – I Have Turned My Thoughts Towards Wisdom
As the rest of us sat back down after our break, one man remained standing. I initially perceived him as generically White, but then I thought he might be Jewish, Arabic or even Latino. He had very dark hair, strong features, and a bit of color in his face. He was dressed in a charcoal-gray tailored suit jacket, like a businessman, but underneath it, he was wearing the most amazing sweater-vest. It depicted a book with a giant eye on the cover, in iridescent colors. There was something very sensual about him. Not sexual, but even while just standing still, he looked like he was enjoying breathing the air, and feeling the sensation of the heavy gold watch on his wrist. He seemed to be waiting for something, and eventually the Host introduced him, although with seeming reluctance.
“Um, we have a special guest in our circle today. Please welcome him, and hear him out.”
“Thank you,” said the man in a brisk, strong voice. “For such a warm welcome. You can call me Brother André, and I’d like to officially express gratitude to the entire Society of Builders for agreeing to host me today. I bring you greetings from the Order of the Perennial Bookmakers.”
There had been quiet murmurs since the moment we returned to the circle, but now they got much louder. I heard someone audibly say “A ‘Bookie’? Here?”
I was as shocked as anyone else. The Builders might be a secret society, but the Perennialists were the stuff of myth and legend. They were said to be a rival group to the Illuminati, every bit as ancient and as mysterious, although not, perhaps, as sinister. I had never believed they actually existed. As had happened when I first entered, I felt a dizzying wave of unreality wash over me.
“You’re a real live Bookie?” Big Man asked.
Brother André’s face betrayed annoyance, as he picked an imaginary piece of lint from his sleeve, but he policed any trace of it out of his voice. “We prefer the term ‘Perennialists’.”
“But it’s true that you believe the whole universe is a book?”
“We believe that this particular reality we exist within is a Book. I don’t know if I would call it a whole universe. It’s just a sub-reality, really.”
“And how do you come to figure that?”
“Revelation.”
“Divine revelation?”
Brother André shot me a sardonic look, as if to say Can you believe this guy?
“No,” he deadpanned. “But please, can we save the questions? I have a limited time to address you, and a lot of important topics to cover.”
“Yes,” agreed our Host. “Why don’t you go ahead and say whatever it is you have to tell us.”
“Right, let me get straight to the point,” said Brother André. As he spoke, he took command of the space with the ease of a practiced speaker, as if this was his own private TED talk. “Science, as everyone agrees, progresses. We can chart it in a linear path, as it builds a pool of useful knowledge, from zero towards one-hundred, spinning off technologies as it goes.
“Philosophy is not like this. It returns to the same subjects again and again, turns over the same ground for millennia. Old arguments are left unresolved, and long-dead philosophers routinely arise from their graves to debate with the newest young upstarts. For this reason, the undiscerning conclude that philosophy does not progress. But does it?”
“I’m going to guess the answer is yes,” Big Man hazarded.
“You’re right, it does. But the progression is cyclical, in a circle, like the patterns of nature, day-and-night, the waxing and waning of the moon, the seasons of the year, the slow, stately precession of the zodiac. One phase succeeds the next, one season gives way to another.” He sounded as if he had given this exact speech hundreds of times.
“But what are the phases of the philosophical cycle? To paraphrase Brentano, skepticism, mysticism, system-building, and didacticism. One way to see them most clearly is in the personas of the three greatest figures in Western Philosophy, the Ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.”
The audible groans that rose from the audience at this point broke Brother André out of his well-rehearsed script. “What? Is it because I mentioned Ancient Greece? Grow up, already. Didn’t we just hear a long speech on how there’s nothing White supremacist about Greece and Rome?”
Big Man seemed to be answering for the room when he said “It’s not just that, Brother Don Killuminati. We’re wondering who invited you into this space, and why you feel qualified to lecture to us. What made you think we need your help?”
Brother André didn’t look like someone who was often surprised, but his thick eyebrows rose up in a perfect portrait of astonishment. “Oh, is that what you think this is? No, you misunderstand. We’re not here to help you. We’re here to ask for your help.”
There was an immediate shift of energy in the room, as his words sunk in. The cloud of boredom and hostility hanging over the circle dissipated, chased out by the crackling electricity of excitement and anticipation.
I felt it too. The Perennialists were looking for something, maybe someone to invite into their privileged inner circle, to initiate into their incomprehensible ecstacies, to collaborate with in inscribing a page into the book that was our universe. And maybe it would be me.
“Wait a moment,” said the Host. “I didn’t know that. But doesn’t that mean?”
“Yes. Welcome to the big leagues, Builders.”
“But, but,” the Host sputtered. “I mean, it’s flattering, but we’re barely five years old. I thought it took millennia…”
Brother André’s mouth twitched. “Yeah, well usually it does. But desperate times call for desperate measures. I won’t say there wasn’t internal resistance, but we fast-tracked your application. And I mean really fast-tracked it. Our internal models indicate we’re near an inflection point, and if we don’t meet certain milestones by then, we’re looking at immanent social and environmental collapse.”
“Immanent?” the Host demanded. “How soon?”
“Well the work I’m here to talk about needs to be well under way by—let’s say—this country’s next election cycle?”
As we digested this information, I could feel the fizzing sparks of energy in the room solidifying into focused attention. It was funny, you would have thought the revelation that Brother André was looking for help, not offering it, would have increased people’s suspicion and doubt, rather than resolve it. But I realized everyone in the room was here for the same reason I was, they wanted to be needed, and to be deployed in some meaningful way.
“But now, if I can continue, I assure you I’m conveying the absolute minimum preparation to understand the task laid out in front of you.”
“Please, go ahead,” said the Host.
“Look, you’re all smart gentlemen, and ladies, here. Ask yourselves, why would the three most famous philosophers in history—excuse me, in Western History—be connected as they are, as a direct progression of teacher-to-student? It would make sense if they represented a single unified school of thought, but the three of them are radically different. Socrates and Aristotle, in particular, represent opposite energies and instincts. They likely would have hated each other had they ever met in person, instead of only being connected via Plato. And yet, it strains credulity to think their association a coincidence. So what is it, if not similar views, that defines their progression?”
“Steel sharpen steel,” said a voice on my left. It was Scruffy Beard. I had gotten so used to hearing Big Man on my right, I had almost forgotten about him. “You got to fight to be heard.” He mimed boxing an invisible opponent. “The bigger you are, the bigger I got to become.”
Brother André looked taken aback for a moment, but he soon recovered. “Right, right, spot on. It is their struggle against each other, the ambition to outdo, the challenge posed to their nature by the previous one’s ideas that pushes them to excel. We can see it in particular in the opposition of Socrates and Aristotle. Socrates is a skeptic, he questions everything. He rejects the received wisdom, attacks cherished institutions, interrogates longstanding traditions, and deconstructs his society.”
“He that dude,” said Scruffy Beard. “Like my uncle, who got out of the joint, and hangs out on the corner, making people explain their lives.”
Brother André had adjusted to Scruffy Beard’s wavelength by this time, and didn’t hesitate. “Yes, exactly. Socrates is a street philosopher, of which Athens had many. He’s a military veteran, and comes back from the war with a lot of inconvenient questions. Right away, he starts making people mad.
“Aristotle, on the other hand is a builder. He’s not attacking institutions, he’s documenting them, celebrating them and recreating them. Opposite energies. But it makes perfect sense if you see them as the complementary phases of a single cycle. One phase breaks down, one phase builds up. Socrates is the fall, and Aristotle the spring. But what happens in the middle, far beneath the bitter snows? What is Plato in this cycle?”
“A bridge?” hazarded the Host, but Brother André shook his head.
“Something more than just that.”
“A mystic,” said another familiar voice. It was Seven. His glasses were off, and the manic energy he displayed earlier had vanished, but he also seemed to have overcome his grief, at least for the moment. When people seemed surprised at his answer, he clarified it. “Well, he said it before, if y’all knuckleheads were listening. Skeptic, mystic, system-builder and then one other.”
“Gold star,” said Brother André. “And what is a mystic? Someone who sees behind the curtain, who knows that this reality is insubstantial and unreal, that we are but words printed on a page, shadows cast upon a wall. It’s not just Plato, of course. There are mystics in all times and places, and all religious traditions. The Sufis of Islam, the Zen Buddhists, the Rosicrucians, the Kabbalists. In Ancient China, around the same time, we can replace Socrates and Plato with Chuang-Tzu the skeptic, and Lao-Tzu the mystic, Zhuangzi and Laozi. Mystics are the people who see the truth face-to-face, who drink directly from the well. In the terms of the Monomyth, they are the heroes who penetrate the underworld, and return with the elixir.
“But what makes Plato unique is his uncommon concern with communicating his inexpressible visions. Most mystical, esoteric traditions, of which our organization, frankly, is one, and yours is another, couch things in veiled, symbolic terms. The Rose, the Lamb, the Tree of Life, the Seven Doors, the Book, the Sigil, the Key, the Anhk, the Eye. The true meanings are known only to the initiate. But Plato, even as he knew and affirmed that he was speaking of things that cannot be spoken, and that he was addressing a blind and deaf audience (no disrespect to the disabled), never ceased trying. Like Jesus, he couched things in parables and metaphors, told stories that made superficial sense in their own terms, but that communicated differently to the inner-door disciples.
“And he spoke to everyone in their own language. He spoke about the law in order to communicate to lawyers, and spoke of politics to politicians, poetry to poets, and art to artists. Even lust, in his lexicon, was transmuted into a longing for the Beautiful, a way to transcend, which is where we get the concept of ‘Platonic love’.”
“But, as with Jesus’ parables, if you only see the surface meaning, you’ve missed the point. If you think the story is about a coin, or a sheep, or a naughty boy, you’ve missed the fact that it’s about God, faith and forgiveness.
“Which is why it’s ironic that Aristotle, Plato’s greatest student, who studied at his feet for twenty years, read all Plato’s dozens of dialogs, yet missed the point of every single one. He read for the obvious meaning, and stopped once he had it. It wasn’t until six-hundred years later that Plotinus finally dug under the surface of the work, and rediscovered what Plato was actually trying to say. But I digress.”
“Yes,” the Host suggested tactfully. “Given that we have other things to discuss, it might be a good idea to focus.”
“I’m getting there. Because it turns out it was a good thing that Aristotle was so literal-minded. It allowed him to do the work of his phase of the cycle, the return from the mystical world to the ordinary one. You see, in all of his dialogs, Plato left mistakes, arguments that don’t work, facts that aren’t factual, claims that don’t hold water. And the reason is because he’s not really concerned with those topics in of themselves, he’s using them as metaphors. The mistakes are to invite the reader in, to captivate them with the irresistible opportunity of correction, and then to lead them down into the depths beyond. But what Aristotle does instead is just fix the errors.
“He goes through all of Plato’s work. All the things that Plato talks about, the law, politics, art, love, science, poetry, Aristotle talks about them too. But there are no mistakes in Aristotle’s work, at least no intentional ones. And when he’s done, the work isn’t a door to Plato’s abstract, removed, ideal, eternal world any more. It’s a portrait of this familiar world, this ordinary world, this physical place of rocks and nails, and heartache and money, and blood, sweat, and semen.”
“Hey!” said Scruffy Beard sharply.
“You get my point. But here’s the interesting thing. In doing so, and in particular, in documenting Athens itself so carefully, Aristotle, who, by the way, is a foreigner, an immigrant, a ‘semi-barbarian,’ translates, or we might say transcribes Athens which is this real, specific physical place, into an abstract idea. He uploads it in a sense, from the ordinary world, up into the Cloud, which is to say, Plato’s realm of The Forms. And in this way, Athens becomes both conceptual and eternal.
“Stay with me here, because this is the crucial turning point. Aristotle’s most famous student is not a philosopher at all. But who is he?”
“My boy, Alex,” said Scruffy Beard.
“Yes! Alexander, AKA Alexander the Great. Conquerer of much of the known world of the time, and founder of the Macedonian Empire. And again, this can’t be a coincidence, that he just happens to learn at the feet of the most celebrated philosopher of his times, and then goes on to dominate the world. I don’t know if he paid attention to everything Aristotle tried to teach him, but he learned one very important thing: Athens could be anywhere, and any place could be Athens.
“And he proved it. He went to Africa, to Egypt, and founded his own city, which he named after himself. He called it Alexandria, but it was Athens by another name, Athens as Aristotle had described it and documented it. It was the start of the monoculture, the world’s first franchise. And after Alexander was gone, Rome too realized they could be Athens, and through them, the entire Mediterranean became Athens.”
“But what that got to do with me?” Scruffy Beard demanded.
Brother André pulled from his breast pocket a beautiful silk handkerchief, embroidered with the Book-and-Eye motif, and used it to mop his sweating brow. “You’re right, you’re right,” he murmured. “I need to make it clear.”
He placed his hand on his chin, and contemplated something in the distance, looking for all the world like Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker.
“Okay,” he said finally. “The point of all of this is that philosophy changes culture. That’s what the progression is for, and why we go through the cycles. The skeptic opens the door, the mystic goes through it, and finds the elixir, the system builder takes that and builds on it, and the world changes.
“Look, what’s the one question every philosopher should have an answer to? The meaning of life, right? You,” he pointed at Scruffy Beard. “What’s your answer? What’s the meaning of life?”
Scruffy Beard shrugged. “Controlling these disrespectful THOTs?”
Brother André shot him a hard look. “No, no, no. That’s the dominant culture talking. Don’t trade your gold coin in for lesser metal. What about you, Seven. What’s your answer?”
“To survive the singularity,” Seven said. “With my humanity intact.”
Brother André pursed his lips. “I’ll have to think a bit more about that one. But I don’t think that’s what I’m looking for, either. Kristofer?”
“The meaning of life,” said Kristofer, “is found in Jesus’ Greatest Commandments, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul and all your mind,’ and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ And I would translate that as follows: Love God through serving humanity, and serve humanity through expressing your own unique self-identity.”
“Mmm, better. That’s not bad. It could definitely be a little pithier. The most powerful philosophies are expressed and understood in a single sentence. ‘I think therefore I am.’ ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ ‘Take the leap of faith.’ But I think you’re on the right path.”
“Sir,” said Big Man, with exaggerated formality. “I am still waiting to ascertain the exact nature of the help you want from this distinguished company.”
Brother André mopped his brow again. “You know, the big problem with philosophy,” he remarked. “Is that people think you’re either telling them something too trivial and simple to care about, or too obscure and complicated for them to understand. Okay, let’s try this. Do you know why we’re called the Bookmakers? It has nothing to do with gambling, nor is it related to our belief that our reality is a Book.”
“Enlighten us.”
“Okay, it all goes back to Ancient Greece…”
There was an immediate chorus of answering groans, but he pushed through them. “No really, I’m almost done here. Ancient Greece wasn’t a single unified nation. Every city was its own little state, and some of them had very different philosophies. And what you learn from that is philosophy creates culture. How people act, how they treat each other, what’s important to them, the decisions they make, it’s all philosophy. Athens was all about art and culture. Sparta had enforced homosexuality, a disdain of luxuries, and a single-minded focus on military dominance. Corinth was the original capitalist society, and Macedonia was all about charismatic leadership. But the great thing was it made for a real-life competition of ideas. No one knew which one would win out. In the end it was art-minded Athens, not militarily-dominant Sparta.
“The same thing happened in Ancient China. They were in a constant state of war, and there were all these different philosophical schools. The Mohists, the Legalists, the Taoists. In the end the Confucianists dominated, and their ideas helped unify the nation.”
Big Man looked ready to interrupt again, but Bother André raised a hand to forestall him. “Now look at the headlines in today’s papers. Everything that happens, every war, every election, every shooting, every Broadway show, it’s all philosophy. It’s all about what people believe, why they believe it, and how they live it out. And that’s what made Alexander so powerful. It wasn’t his military genius, it was the fact that he was able to get everyone on one single unified philosophical wavelength. It all went back to Aristotle, and beyond him, to Plato, even Socrates.
“And that’s what brings us to the Bookmaking process. What I’m about to tell you, by the way, is a secret that hasn’t been shared outside of our order in the past thousand years. That’s how serious the crisis in which we find ourselves.”
His voice became very quiet and serious, and I felt that sense of unreality rising up around me again through the spell of his words.
“When an acolyte pledges to us, we take them through an initiation process. First, we deliberately expose them to skepticism, in order to break down all their preexisting beliefs. Some can’t take it, and go mad. Other never progress past it and become nihilists. Others survive it unscathed, yet to no apparent benefit.
“But for the elect, the door opens to the mystical realm beneath this one. For some it’s just a quick glance. Others are favored to spend hours or days gazing through the portal. And some pass through it and never return. But the goal is to come back with the elixir, which is to say, a fresh understanding of the Meaning of Life.
“Once that happens, the real work starts. Because what makes a philosophy powerful? It’s a single simple idea that applies to all things, and because it applies to all things, it brings all things into unity. A philosophy is a vehicle of resonance. If a man, or woman, has wealth and power, but no philosophy, their efforts will come to nothing, because there will be no consistency, and the things they do in the morning will work against the things they do at night. If two or three people come together, but without a common philosophy, they will make no progress, because the work of the one will act in opposition to the work of the others. And if a nation has no common philosophy, no matter how grand or powerful it may seem, it will squander all its vast resources on infighting.”
“That sounds familiar,” said Sister Imani.
“That’s why we craft our Books. A Perennialist’s Book does the same work that Aristotle did for Plato. It takes the core idea, the elixir, if you will, and applies it to all things. A fully realized Book will tell you what to eat and how to sleep, what work to pursue and how to pursue it, how to dress, how to treat each other, what words to use and avoid. It will inform your art and your music, your intimate and your familial relationships, and hundreds of other details, all tied back to that single core concept. We create these books, sometimes taking a lifetime to do so, and then we deploy them out into the world. Our goals is to let them battle towards victory, in a Darwinian struggle, as in Ancient Greece or Ancient China. May the best philosophy win!”
“But something went wrong?” the Host said.
As his voice broke Brother André’s spell, I realized how completely caught up I had been in the idea. Why hadn’t I ever been recruited for the Bookmakers? It sounded like everything I had always dreamed of.
“Yes,” Brother André admitted sadly. The vitality that had radiated out of him earlier seemed to have faded away, and he looked diminished, and years older.
“And what was it?” the Host pressed.
“Look around you,” Brother André said. “The state the world is in. It was never supposed to come to this. It’s a complete philosophical failure—philosophical collapse. Don’t get me wrong, many of the great philosophers throughout history have been ours.”
“Which ones?” demanded Big Man.
“I can’t tell you,” Brother André said.
“Convenient,” Big Man muttered under his breath.
“But in any case, none in a long time. Several centuries. Well. It took us far too long to admit it, even to ourselves, but we’ve failed. Our elixirs aren’t strong enough. We’re too derivative of Plato. Existential drift has taken the world too far outside our zone of understanding. I don’t know what the real answer is, any of these, or all of these, but we can’t afford to bet on having a last-minute breakthrough. There’s too much at stake. That’s why we’re coming to you.”
“Spell it out for us,” said the Host.
“We want you to make Books.”
“What, like you do?”
“Yes. Now look, we’re not trying to absorb you into our Order, nor force you to go through our initiation. But do your best to get us those last few steps over the finish line. You won’t see or hear from us again, but I’ve given you the basic template. Make your Books, and put them out there, as many as possible, and may the best one win. The one that will unify the planet. The one that will build tomorrow’s global empire.”
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